Gates Foundation support for outbreak preparedness and response: FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Disease outbreaks can threaten lives, disrupt livelihoods, and place enormous pressure on health systems. The Gates Foundation supports partners working to help countries detect and respond to health threats earlier and more effectively. This includes investments in disease / detection, workforce management, diagnostics, genomic sequencing, data systems, emergency preparedness and response, vaccine and treatment access, community health systems, and stronger regional coordination.
Driven by our charitable mission, the foundation supports country- and continent-led priorities by working with governments, institutions, researchers, and implementing partners. This includes helping strengthen local capacity to generate and use data, build laboratory and disease surveillance systems, improve access to tools, and support institutions that are best placed to respond to public health threats in their own contexts.
During outbreaks, however, our Emergency Response team works alongside governments, regional, and national health institutions to provide targeted support and assistance. Our role is catalytic: connecting partners with resources, evidence, tools, and technical capacity that can help strengthen response systems and accelerate access to lifesaving interventions.
The foundation also supports medical countermeasure development, through Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and other investments, disease modeling to guide outbreak decisions, and frontline health workers through WHO’s Global Health Emergency Corps.
The cost of waiting is far higher than the cost of preparing. Outbreaks can move quickly across communities and borders, threatening lives, disrupting livelihoods, overwhelming health systems, and damaging economies. Investing early in disease detection, diagnostics, laboratories, data systems, and trained health workers helps countries detect threats sooner and respond before outbreaks escalate.
The foundation provides resources through trusted partners with the technical expertise, local presence, and delivery systems needed to reach communities most at risk. Funding is designed to support the tools and systems that help outbreak responses move quickly and equitably, including disease detection, data for public health action, community health workers, primary health care systems, diagnostics, and delivery platforms that can reach underserved or hard-to-reach populations.
The foundation also works with partners to align support with country-led priorities and response plans, so resources strengthen existing public health systems rather than create parallel efforts. Foundation-supported work is guided by global access principles, which means that knowledge, tools, and products developed with foundation support should be made broadly available, accessible, and affordable to the people and communities that need them most.
Yes, in some cases. The foundation may provide targeted funding or strategic investments to private-sector partners when their expertise can help advance charitable goals, such as developing vaccines, diagnostics, health technologies, or delivery tools. These investments are subject to global access commitments to ensure resulting products or knowledge are made broadly available, accessible, and affordable to the people who need them most.
Our support is guided by the foundation’s charitable mission and global health strategy informed by public health need, partner requests, potential for impact, and alignment with country and regional priorities. The foundation focuses on areas where its support can help accelerate access to tools, strengthen systems, or reduce the risk of wider spread.
No. Vaccines can play an important role in preventing and mitigating outbreaks, but outbreak preparedness and response require a wider system. This includes disease detection and laboratory capacity, diagnostics, data systems supply chains, regulatory systems, community engagement, infection prevention, and trained health workers. These systems work together to help countries identify and respond to health threats quickly and effectively.
Improved disease surveillance is essential for early detection of outbreaks, informed public health responses, and global health security especially in regions where the burden of infectious disease is highest. We focus on genomics, epidemiology, and data modeling because they are high-value, cost-effective approaches that have the potential to supplement and improve traditional clinical disease surveillance programs.
Genomic surveillance helps public health systems identify pathogens, track how they are changing, and understand whether cases are connected in the same transmission chain. This evidence can guide faster and more targeted action, including outbreak investigation, contact tracing, diagnostics, vaccine and therapeutic decisions, infection prevention, and cross-border coordination. It is especially important for diseases such as Ebola, mpox, cholera, Lassa fever, and other emerging threats.
Outbreak preparedness strengthens the core systems that countries rely on every day for routine health services including laboratories, data systems, health workers, supply chains, community health platforms, and regulatory capacity. Investing in preparedness therefore helps countries to detect and respond to emergencies faster while also improving everyday health system resilience.
Outbreaks, including COVID-19, Ebola, mpox, cholera, Marburg, and other infectious disease threats have shown that countries need strong systems before crises escalate. These experiences reinforce the importance of supporting early, targeted investments and innovations that help countries to detect and respond to threats faster including disease detection, rapid diagnostics, genomic sequencing, trusted data, local and regional manufacturing, regulatory readiness, community engagement, and frontline health workers. Outbreak preparedness is not built during an emergency; it must be sustained before, during, and after outbreaks.
The long-term goal is to help countries and regional institutions build stronger, more resilient public health systems that can identify and respond to threats early. The Gates Foundation supports targeted, catalytic investments, technical collaboration and innovations in surveillance, diagnostics, genomics, data use, regulatory systems, supply chains, and community health. By helping strengthen these systems before the next outbreak begins, countries are better positioned to protect lives, improve health outcomes, and build healthier futures for their communities.